Shady for Mac

Shady puts a shade over your screen to help soothe your tired or dazzled eyes. You can use it to reduce your Mac's brightness far below the usual minimum, without any risk of damage to your screen.

Shady works on Mac OS X Leopard (10.5), and Snow Leopard (10.6) or later. It's completely free, and if you're a developer you can grab the source code too.

Brighter than bright

Modern Macs have exceptionally bright screens, and often the minimum brightness level is still dazzling. If you're working late at night, or your eyes are tired or maybe you're just sensitive to bright light, it can be difficult to stare at the screen for long periods. That's where Shady comes in.

Pull the shades

Shady lets you pull a virtual shade over your screen (or screens, if you have more than one - Shady covers them all), dimming the display to a more comfortable level.

The shade will ignore your mouse clicks, naturally, so you can continue to use your Mac as usual.

You can brighten the shade all the way up to your normal screen brightness, or darken it down to 90% shade (very nearly black). It'll change in increments of 5%, and it starts at 40% opacity (or 60% transparency), which should be quite comfortable.

Shady will save your shade level and restore it next time you launch the app, and it'll also automatically get out of your way when it's launched (returning the focus to whatever app you were in when you launched Shady).

Shady doesn't do anything funky to your system (it's just a regular application; just quit it and trash it if you don't want it anymore), and will not damage your screens in any way. It should, however, make your eyes feel better - as long as you don't make your screen so dark that you're straining to see anything!

Shade your way

You can control Shady right from your menubar, choosing the shade level you find most comfortable.

If you chooose to have Shady's icon appear in your Dock and Application Switcher (it will by default), then you can also control it via the keyboard when Shady is the frontmost application. There's even a handy overlay to remind you which keys you can use.